Things are falling apart in the concluding book of The Book of Dust, the next of Philip Pullman's grand trilogies set in a world that manifests, now more than ever, as a energized and skewed version of our own. Organizations are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disturbing lines. An unseen force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; simultaneously, "wealth is decaying, and no one knows why". Power is draining from governments, and gathering in the offices of theocrats, the treasuries of conglomerates, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, very quietly, very subtly", says businessman a merchant figure, keeping a vigilant eye on the Silk Roads from his place in an Aleppo cafe. "Aspects we thought were firm and durable are deteriorating and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Her Quest
Exactly what that something might be, and ways to oppose it, is the inquiry that drives this final volume, which picks up where the previous book left off. This is, reportedly, the author's final foray into the elaborately built, infinitely beguiling universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose geography maps on to that of this world, but whose history tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals appear and reason and act like us, but are joined by external spirits, beings in animal form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are taken and tea is drunk, and middle-aged scholars carry Harrods shopping bags. The protagonist, whom we first met as a child in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then revisited as a toddler in the first volume, the origin story with which Pullman began this trilogy, is now a mature individual: still distinctly the prickly and persistent main character of the prior volumes, but older, sadder, more careful, more doubtful. This restraint is intensified by her split from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, unexpectedly, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in search of that innocent part of the heroine which she may have forgotten (an quality which he symbolizes as her "vision"), and her mission to rejoin with him, were the catalysts of the prior book, which followed Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, meeting with marvel and risk on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in play, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious ruling body, and the author's masterfully eerie representation of strict, administrative wickedness – is under recent guidance, and flexing its muscles. Lyra's uncle – the heroine's family member, who blames her for his sister's death – has worked himself into the office of president of the Magisterium's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh power to extend the religion's rule. Malcolm Polstead, who carried young the heroine to refuge along a overflowing river as an 11-year-old in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a secondary role in intelligence work: he is assigned to Geneva to discover more about Delamare's aims. And underlying all of this is the enigma surrounding the rare and valuable essential oil which seems mysteriously to be the origin of a societal and economic upheaval spreading out from the region. The extract is regarded by certain groups as a tradeable commodity, by alternate groups as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by others still – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an challenge that must be obliterated. The question of its origins, its significance, and whether it should be destroyed or safeguarded is coming rapidly to the fore.
As in His Dark Materials, our protagonist's deeds, and her destiny, are shown to be inseparably connected with the future of the world
In The Secret Commonwealth, these storylines ran mostly in parallel. In The Rose Field, they converge. Like the first trilogy, her actions and her fate are shown to be inseparably entwined with the fate of the world. Her private mission to reconnect with her companion and recover her creativity becomes the central struggle in a wider conflict with an controlling regime which, as these systems often attempt, is seeking to stifle independence of thinking, creativity and culture: all the personal, resistant ways in which individuals can be liberated.
Cosmic Openings and Philosophical Struggles
The book begins with the discovery of a set of curious fissures in the fabric of the planet's atmosphere: windows that seem to lead to different dimensions. One such portal seems to be the source of the highly contested botanical substance. The authority, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the church's orthodoxy and endeavors to destroy them. As our protagonist begins to turn away from strict rationalism and return to intuition, yet, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that what they stand for and what they provide is mysteriously essential – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we name it," she says, "we need it." The scene for a Blakean struggle between naivety and maturity is prepared.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At 640 pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the
